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This paper is lucid in concept, thinking and style and contributes to an interesting and as yet unsolved problem. It is a move in a most promising direction.
With all the productivity of its distinguished author, allowance must be made for the reliance on only one particular part of Freud's thought as a basis for the theory developed here, which, however, the author labels “speculation.” I refer to his using, as an explanation of the differences between humanist and scientist, a single global concept, the oedipus complex, and also curiosity about birth.
Psychoanalysis and psychodynamics today provide for more detailed knowledge than so broad a concept as the oedipal complex. Even if this is important here, then why does the humanist solve his Oedipus one way and the scientist another? There must be some more specific factor or factors to account for this.
And is it true that all human curiosity is sexual and that the first problem to engage a child is procreation?
In very young animals, curiosity is unmistakable since it is so frankly acted out, but it does not yet seem to be sexual. For when it becomes sexual, this is undisguised in the behavior.
Freud did not develop one of his greatest discoveries, the role of childhood influences, but he returns to it in the Outline of Psychoanalysis in a clear, definite statement: Early emotional influences shape the personality for life. Probably the oedipal situation is one of these influences among others.
Freud's early writings reflect what he first studied, namely, sex. But later, he and psychoanalysis have recognized the importance of many other factors—e.g., dependence, love and the need to be loved, hostility (which is probably part of the fight-flight mechanism of adaptation)—and welcomed relevant findings of the ethologists such as imprinting.
Of course, what is needed is clear to the author: facts derived from such analyses of humanists and scientists as are based on an open-minded, thorough, intuitive and scientific unders